Helldivers 2 creative director and Arrowhead Game Studios CCO Johan Pilstedt spoke about the development of Helldivers 2 and its success at a recent talk during Game Developer’s Conference 2025. As caught by PCGamer, Pilstedt revealed that development on the game was difficult due to poor planning.
At the talk, Pilstedt revealed that Helldivers 2 didn’t go through a more traditional pre-production stage that game development usually needs in order to plan things out. Rather, the studio assumed that it would be able to wrap up development on the game in around four years.
“We were throwing around some ideas, and then we got a little cautious because we’ve been burned before by making games that are a little bit too complicated for what we’re capable of, and then having to crunch. It takes so much energy,” Pilestedt said. “So we said, ‘This will be easy. We can probably do it in four years.'”
As it turned out, development Helldivers 2 took almost twice the time that the studio originally predicted. According to Pilstedt, work on the game was considered done in 7 years, 11 months and 26 days. He largely puts this down to the fact that the studio decided to skip the pre-production phase and dove straight into full development without planning.
“We already knew where the game was going to go and headed straight into production—it was a really, really, really bad idea,” Pilestedt said. “Always do your homework before you start spending millions and millions and millions of dollars in making a game.”
More details about Helldivers 2‘s development were revealed earlier this month during a live stream celebrating the first anniversary of the game’s release. Speaking on the live stream, head of product testing Patrik Lasota revealed that the co-op shooter was originally designed around having 5-player squads.
“Helldivers 2 was originally designed for five people, actually,” said Lasota. “That was Johann’s call because he had thoughts around ‘when you’re four people playing and a fifth joins you, suddenly you’re a three-stack and a two-stack, and it creates this imbalance. But if it’s five people and someone joins then you’re two three-stacks, and with three groups instead one becoming a pair.’”
The decision to go with 4-players quads as we see in the Helldivers 2 today largely comes down to the fact that the original concept “just didn’t work.” According to Lasota, 5-players quads led to one player just “standing around, not really participating int he action.” It also gave players more freedom in their choice of Stratagems to take on missions, which took away a fair bit of the tension the studio wanted to create for players.
In the same livestream, Lasota also revealed that the studio had ultimately cut quite a few ideas that were originally planned for it. This includes more variability in the planets that players could land on, with some even potentially featuring different gravity. The idea was ultimately canned because of the extra work low-gravity jumping and landing would create for the game’s animators.
Helldivers 2 is available on PC and PS5. Check out our review for more details.
